Bad Beat Therapy, Part Six: The Psychopathology of Everyday Players

by Robert SamuelsTwo
Plus Two Magazine, Vol. 14, No. 2

Although professional poker players and advanced regulars often try to categorize other players by dividing them into discrete groups, what is often missing from their analysis is a clear understanding of the different personality disorders that dominate our current culture. To help remedy this situation, I will use psychoanalytic thinking to refine your understanding of the underlying motivations shaping the play of other players.

Narcissism at the Table

One of the main psychological pathologies showing up at poker tables today is called narcissistic personality disorder. Although people think they know what narcissism is, it is actually more complicated than it first appears: basically a narcissist is someone who needs the recognition of others because he or she has a fragile sense of self. Therefore, one reason why these people seem so focused on showing off is that they constantly need the approval of others. We all have this narcissistic need, but in some people it is exaggerated and they are obsessed about what other people think about them. For poker players, this obsession can be a big problem since it can not only block real self-awareness, but it can also lead to making moves only to uphold an ideal table image. For instance, players will refuse to bluff because they are afraid of what will happen if they go to showdown, and they have to reveal bad cards. Perhaps the biggest problem with poker players having a narcissistic personality is that they may be playing the game only for an endless quest for approval and recognition.

Psychoanalysts believe the cause for this disorder is that young people, who have either gotten too much or too little praise from their parents, grow up with an extreme desire to be praised by everyone they encounter. This form of narcissism explains why many people go on Facebook to post pictures of themselves or relate their latest activities. In our culture, there is a hunger for constant validation, and even though we are supposed to be a society of independent individuals, we have a culture of narcissism that pushes people to try to constantly have a positive image of themselves verified by others.

For poker players, this need to be recognized and praised may mean that they are only playing to win some big tournament or cash game to prove to themselves that they are good and loveable. One of the negative effects of this psychology is that when players do not win or they lose money, they may enter into a spiral of self-hatred, which we often call tilt. A key then of overcoming this pathology and its destructive effects is to stop worrying about how other people think about you. This change is easier said than done, but it is an essential element of bad beat therapy. To be an effective and happy player, one must avoid tilt. And to avoid tilt, one has to give up the desire for recognition and approval. Moreover, if one wants to improve, one has to be open to criticism, and this is the main thing that narcissists cannot tolerate. Since their self-image is so fragile, any criticism is seen as a direct threat to their identity.

Borderline Personalities

While narcissists are obsessed about what other people think about them, people with borderline personalities have a hard time controlling their impulses, and this causes them to be prone to addiction and failed relationships. Many times, the driving force behind this impulsive behavior is a desire to escape a strong sense of shame, guilt, or anxiety. By engaging in self-destructive behavior, you can gain a temporary control over your life, and by using intense experiences of enjoyment, you can try to blot out the pain of having a conscience. The rush of winning and losing money can function to block self-awareness and flood the mind with pleasurable neurotransmitters. In other words, people use gambling as a way of escaping from their own lives and self-awareness, but what they need to do is to face the truth of their actions and the effect their actions have on other people.

Addicts with a borderline personality also like to punish themselves for their underlying sense of guilt and shame. Thus, poker players may make huge bets and force bad losses because they do not think they deserve to win or they want to punish themselves for actions done in the past. The addict then gets into a vicious cycle where each loss leads to more pain and shame, but the main solution to the suffering only leads to more guilt. I have noticed that this type of player can do well for a period of time, and then they make a bad move that puts their whole stack in jeopardy. Of course, when they later tell their bad beat story, they were the blameless victim of horrible bad luck. But, if you listen closely to what they say, there is usually evidence that they knew they were making a big mistake.

Online Poker, Boredom, and Focus

Not only are many players hurt by their narcissistic and borderline personalities, but our current digital culture also creates a more general form of psychopathology. In our age of instant access to information and pleasure, players often have a hard time being patient or sitting still and focusing on the task in front of them. When people now show up at the poker table, they are so habituated to media stimulation that they can’t turn off their phones or focus on the game itself. Dealers, then, have to constantly tell players who are surfing the web or texting to put in their blinds and antes. It is amazing that these wired players are ever able to win since they seem to ignore most of what is going on in the game.

Part of the reason for this loss of focus has to be new media technology and a new set of acceptable social behaviors. In the case of poker, online players are simply used to playing multiple tables and not having to wait to get a good hand or some action. These players do not have to try to read people’s physical tells, and so they focus instead on betting patterns, strategies, math, and pain thresholds. However, the loss of real physical interaction in online games may hurt them when they play a live game because they are unable to interact with others or interpret physical behavior. Online players may also have a hard time with in-person bad beats because when they are alone playing a game on the internet, they do not have to face the visual reactions of the people around them. In fact, psychology tells us that one of the things that make us act in an ethical way is the simple experience of having someone look at us. In fact, a famous experiment showed that when you use an honor system to get people to pay for coffee, more people will pay if a picture of a pair of eyes is posted behind the coffee pot. Unfortunately, in the online world, these eyes are usually missing, and people feel freer to cheat and lie.

Online Problems

Online poker, then, may lead to a higher level of dishonest behavior, and it also can make people less able to regulate the addictive nature of gaming. As the study of slot machines has taught us, people often become addicted to games that dole out what is called intermittent rewards. This means that when you do not know when you will be rewarded next, you have harder time stopping the activity. In the case of online poker, you have the worst of two worlds: a game of intermittent rewards is combined with an environment lacking ethical physical cues.

Making matters worse is that players often drink or take drugs when they play, and this not only limits their rational thinking and impulse control, but it can cause a sense of depression that can only be reversed by a high-risk activity. On one level, people may know that alcohol is a depressant, but I don’t think they believe this to be true. Also, studies show that people who spend the most amount of their time on the Web have an increased chance of feeling depressed - even if they are engaged in social networks.

Why You Cannot Sleep

Online gaming, anxiety, and depression also affect how people sleep, and we know that it is very hard to play your A-game if you do not sleep enough. However, most people do not understand why they cannot sleep or what they can do to fix this issue. In fact, the problem of not being able to sleep has become a national epidemic with many different causes, and unfortunately, the most common solution is to take sleeping pills, which can result in a self-destructive cycle where one takes a downer to go to sleep and then a stimulant to wake up and stay awake. These drugs can have a tremendous negative effect on your body and mind and should be avoided if possible.

The question remains why so many people cannot sleep, and one of the main reasons is they cannot stop thinking and worrying. One solution to this problem is to train yourself to change your thoughts and stop focusing on negative emotions in order to go to sleep. My advice here is the opposite of what I have been saying throughout these articles: while meditative practices that train you how to stop thinking are bad for dealing with real problems and issues, when you need to sleep or rest, you have to train your mind how to stop processing information, and this can be done by establishing a “happy place” or fantasy world disconnected from your everyday reality. The goal then is to disconnect when you want to sleep and to re-connect when you want to learn and think.

Another reason why players cannot get a good night sleep is that they wake up in the middle of the night due to anxiety dreams. The main cause for these disturbing dreams is that when your conscious mind goes to sleep, your unconscious mind is able to bring up all of the things that you have been trying not to think about during the day. The solution to this problem is to deal with your issues through radical self-honesty during the day, so that you can have a peaceful sleep at night. However, most poker coaches and psychologists cannot help people with their sleep issues because they do not understand how the unconscious mind works, and they do not get their clients to practice radical self-honesty. Since people inside and outside of poker are not really dealing with their problems, they take prescription medication and other drugs to regulate their anxiety and energy. In fact, we now have a giant medical-pharmaceutical complex that feeds off of people’s vulnerabilities and provides alternative ways to silence thinking and difficult emotions. The problem with most of these medical solutions is that they only treat the symptoms (anxiety, lack of sleep) and not the underlying causes (the need to punish oneself, the fear of success, the aversion to risk).

Analysis of a Poker Dream

To help you understand how dreams, sleep, and poker interact, I will relate the following example. The night before I was going to play in a poker tournament, I had the following dream: I am about to board a cruise ship and I see on the boat, the name “Q8.” The next day after this dream, for the second hand, I am dealt a Queen and an 8 unsuited, which I would normally not play, but the dream pushed me to take a chance. The flop comes QJ8, and I make a big bet with my two pair, but I lose to a straight on the river. The first thing I want to note here is that I was seduced by magical thinking since I only played the hand because my dream predicted the hole cards. Then, when the flop hit my two cards, I felt my dream had predicted the future. Of course, this is irrational magical thinking, but what I want to stress is that the dream did have a meaning. When I free associated about the content of the dream, I realized that when I was growing up, the most luxurious thing my parents did was take a trip on the Queen Elizabeth, also known as the QE. In my unconscious, I transformed the QE into a Q8, and this tied together poker with the fantasy of impressing my parents by being able to afford a fancy cruise. Instead of the dream telling me to play Q8 the next day, I think it was saying that I am playing in order to get rich and try to impress my family.

What is so funny about this dream and the next day is that I later was dealt again Q8 unsuited, and again I played it against my better judgment, and again I lost big. This failure to learn from my past mistake shows how strong magical thinking can be at the poker table. Also, because I did not analyze the dream yet in an honest way, I saw it as some mystical prophesy. In other words, I choose superstition over reason, and I paid the price for my desire to believe in some mystical higher power.